Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
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Corrupt corporate media outlets like The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to justify their role in disseminating terrorist talking points to the world without scrutiny.
“After Hospital Blast, Headlines Shift With Changing Claims,” one of the outlet’s Thursday headlines reads.
NYT acknowledges that it was one of the “many Western news organizations” that regurgitated the unsubstantiated lie (sourced directly from the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip) that Israel killed hundreds by bombing a Gaza hospital.
Even though there was plenty of evidence absolving the Jewish state of the alleged war crime, the publication made no effort to issue retractions, print corrections, or even apologize for its role in the American press’s collective amplification of the propaganda.
Instead, NYT blames its feckless participation in the rumor mill — that incited violence against European and American embassies across the globe — on “fast-moving events” and “the difficulty of covering the war.”
NYT’s original coverage of the so-called blast, which was the result of a misfired jihadist rocket that landed in a parking lot near the hospital, featured a photo of a destroyed building that had nothing to do with the hospital in question.
When evidence mounted that jihadis, not Israel, were responsible for the destruction, both of which were far less than what original reports suggested, NYT covertly modified its original headline at least three times in an attempt to cover up its reckless role in the information war.
By Thursday, the feature image on the Times’ breaking news article pinning blame on Israel was replaced with a nondescript photo of a Middle Eastern man being transported into an intact medical facility on a gurney.
NYT further tried to absolve itself of accountability by noting that it sent out a news alert about a “misfired Palestinian rocket” once Israel’s internal investigations revealed it was not the perpetrator. That little news alert hours after NYT first blamed Israel did nothing, especially since dozens of corporate media outlets merely pivoted their coverage to indicate that Israel and terrorists were “trading blame” for the blast.
In a continued attempt to build its case, NYT quoted a former executive editor of The Associated Press, the same outlet that hired a terrorist sympathizer to be its Gaza correspondent and even shared office space with Hamas at one point. The AP veteran lamented that it’s not easy for media outlets to get “firsthand or verified accounts” of the war easily.
NYT used the ex-editor’s quote as a springboard to suggest that the Israel and Hamas war caused “vast amounts of misleading and false information online.”
The tone-deaf statement came mere sentences after the outlet feigned shock that, after dozens of headlines purported Israel was in the wrong, “much of the Arab world united in support of Palestinians.”
“It takes time to independently verify the claims from all sides,” NYT insisted, less than 24 hours after it failed to verify terrorists’ claims before publishing them as facts.
War propaganda is tough to sift through, but it takes deliberate stupidity to think that the word of the same guys who just raped and murdered 1,400 people and counting is worth splaying across breaking news banners and above-the-fold stories. Trusting the people who use women and children as human shields and stockpile weaponry and munitions near schools and hospitals was NYT’s first mistake, if you can call it that.
As Federalist Senior Editor David Harasanyi pointed out on Wednesday, the Times has a long track record of “spreading similar disinformation.”
“The paper’s editorial board and its op-ed pages are teeming with Hamas apologists — as are its news pages,” Harsanyi warned.
The NYT’s terrible track record is the product of unchecked corruption that plagues every corporate media outlet in the U.S.
Terrorists know outlets like NYT are corrupt. That is why they pitch their latest public relations campaigns to newsrooms with full confidence that their talking points will dominate front pages. A majority of Americans know the media is a corrupt threat to democracy because most outlets are run by partisans who want to divide the country.
The latest NYT article even proves that the media know they are corrupt. They simply aren’t sorry about it.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.